The Nature and Art of Workmanship A Book by David Pye www.bloomsbury.com That which requires caringMass production of variable productsFrom hands to machinesEmploys nothing at allWhat is Folk Craft? designmakingcraftstyle
The Nature and Aesthetics of Design A Book by David Pye books.google.com Any imaginable shapeUseless work on useful thingsPresentableThe principle of arrangementThe minimum condition+35 More More real than living manThat which requires caringThe informing idea of functionalism designaestheticsmakingstylecraftbeauty
What Le Corbusier got right about office space An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished. Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives. ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not. workpersonalityownershipmodularitychoice